Chester is a city that has maintained its pre-WW2 architecture better than most, and going black-and-white seems appropriate today. It also hides the anomaly that is the bright blue of the sign for bus stop S3. Yes, I was in the beer garden of the Town Crier at this point, but at least it was after noon. Just.
This is definitely liquid nitrogen (or was, until a second or two previously), as it’s going into the Air Liquide tank next to the Engineering building. All sorts of things might be going on in there, with applications for liquid nitrogen ranging from the preservation of human remains through the digging of tunnels to the making of ice cream. As uni doesn’t have a cookery department, though, it’s probably not the last one. I can’t discount the first.
Going on the gig posters that still sit, forlornly, behind a metal screen just to the right of this shot, the Retro Bar, on the corner of Sackville and Charles Streets in Manchester, closed in summer 2025. The reason? Because there are no longer any students up at this end of the campus. Whatever is being planned for the acreage of the old UMIST buildings, it has involved gradually emptying them over the last decade or so, and accumulating what must amount to real estate value of tens, perhaps even hundreds, of millions of pounds. I’m sure my employer is well aware of this.
Meanwhile — it was loud and peaceful, so Mark attests. Note the train heading over the viaduct.
The houses on Windsor Road in Hebden Bridge always make a good subject and I think this is the sixth time they have appeared on here by now — but it’s been fifteen years, so I ask for that to be taken into consideration when judging my claim to want to avoid repeition on here. Definitely an effective illustration of certain engineering principles though, and of variations on a theme . I make it that there are forty windows visible on this shot in whole or in part, all the same, but all just that little bit different too.
The sun continues to shine and it was far too nice a day to extend the whole ‘working at home’ thing past about 3pm, particularly bearing in mind it is now the weekend (cf. yesterday’s comment). These people may well be on their way home too as they wait for the hourly bus to Haworth and Keighley.
Is it a flower? A back-scratcher for use in some gargantuan shower? The severed limb of a creature with a fetish for chain-link jewellry? (I think that’s it for my free-association work.)
I cnanot think of anything deep to say about this one, except that it represents a day spent at home not doing much. This is a variable time of year; in mid-April in some other years I have been in Ljubljana, Melbourne and Windhoek, but this year all the spring travelling is already done.
So I’m trying to work this one out. Did someone simply not bother to overpaint, or remove, the entire sign? Or was the original commission a misunderstanding, and Kirklees County Council fully intended to warn drivers and others that around the corner they might encounter one or more specimens of Equus zebra? Inquiring minds want to know.
A trip out to the suburbs today: definitely not the former Communist blocks, more like leafy Hampstead or Carshalton (if this were London). Streets named after composers, big gardens and garages, that kind of thing. One thing I like about Berlin is that it’s all quite laid back: it certainly doesn’t have the over-energised manicness of some capital cities. Perhaps this shot captures that.
Being 42 